Coffee, Amaro cocktails and stuffed mouse

Cache Bouren celebrated earlier this week with long -standing customers and former employees who have spent Haberdasher’s 15th anniversary, the underground craft cocktail fair that he opened as Singlebarrel in 2010.

But you couldn’t blame him if his mind was elsewhere. It is a few weeks a few weeks before the opening of another cocktail fair, Bitterbuck, in the booming alley of the city center of San Jose.

Bitterbuck will be his third watering hole in the city center – or fourth if you count the transformation of Singlebarrel in Haberdasher separately. And as much as he threw in an entirely different direction from Haberdasher when he launched the “West Coast Honky Tonk” only on rue Santa Clara in 2021, Bitterbuck will be something else.

“Even starting with Singlebarrel, I look around to see what is missing,” he said. Amaros at a time, and Bouren thinks that there is enough variety in downtown bars to support a more specialized place.

During the day, the accent will be on premium coffee – but there will be no espresso machine in the house. It will be all the versators using an automatic Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Bouren – which has been obsessed with coffee for a few years now – likes because it can have up to five cups at a time, with a little robotic beak dancing between cups at the right time. As the day ends in the evening, the accent moves to sparkling wines, bitter liquors and cocktails made with help.

The signature drink will be the Garibaldi, a classic cargo and orange juice that Bitterbuck has refined to make the orange juice “soft”, so that the drink has the taste of a drunk orange julius.

Notch Gonzalez, the designer who created the breathtaking interiors for the Tiki Bars, Dr Funk in San Jose and the Cove de Smuggler in San Francisco, has created a new Bitterbuck look, using dark wood and stained glass inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. And after a casual remark to a journalist about the decor, including “fanciful taxidermia”, Bouren decided to look into this – dotting the place with plush mice in cute costumes.

Tiki Tiki: If you are a fan of Tiki cocktails and culture, you are probably aware of his “founding father”, Donn Beach, who founded a series of Don the Beachcomber restaurants in the middle of the 20th century. And you may know that most of his personal history was a well-designed marketing ploy (a bit like what was done with Sarah Winchester to make her mansion a tourist attraction). His life and the fascinating subculture which follows it is the subject of a new documentary, “The Donn of Tiki”, which will have a projection of a night at 7 p.m. Sunday at the 3Below Theatres in downtown San Jose. You can get more information and tickets on www.thedonnofiki.com.